Entrepreneurship and innovation. A cognitive perspective

Metaphors and analogies play a crucial role in strategic change and in framing critical events that are constantly faced by organizations, especially during innovation processes. This research explores in depth entrepreneurs’ own perspectives and cognition during innovation activities, providing deeper insights about how critical events – inside and outside the company, with internal peers and with external actors – are linguistically elaborated and transmitted by ex post narration. Relying on 39 semi-structured interviews to successful entrepreneurs operating in the Veneto region of the northern Italy, we discovered firstly how metaphor plays a repairing and distancing role in breakdown situations. Second, how metaphor is always created by referring to specific semantic domains that act as institutional categories during innovation processes (i.e. war, journey, religion). Then, metaphor is a valuable discursive resource that permits researchers to investigate the broader institutional environment in which entrepreneurs are embedded. This research contributes to the literature of innovation and entrepreneurship, providing empirical evidence about entrepreneurial cognitive mechanisms during innovation processes.